Growing up, everyone told me that I could be anything I wanted, an idea that still seems supremely attractive to me. The only problem was that they didn't tell me that I couldn't be everything I wanted. At some point, I would need to choose which of my many potentials I wanted to pursue. I couldn't become a college professor and lawyer and a movie star all at once. I'd have to make a choice.
This post is not directly about Mormon rhetoric; rather, it's a personal confession about why I find it so very difficult to exercise my agency now that I have left college. At some point I realized that I found the possibility of being able to choose to be so many people more exciting than any one choice I could possibly make. Regardless of how good that choice was, it couldn't match in excitement the vision of having so many choices to make. I was in love with agency itself. Paralyzingly in love with it.
But there was another reason that I found agency difficult to exercise after college: I suddenly needed to be responsible for my own choices. I loved school, because I loved the fact that I made choices that were rewarded by my teaches with approval or disapproval. In fact, growing up most of the choices I made were either affirmed or not by the people I interacted with, meaning that my choices were, alas, probably as much their choices as mine. I exercised agency, of course, but I exercised that agency within a system that others largely determined for me. And I loved the comfort that system gave.
I think my inability to commit to one choice is profoundly linked to the fact that I am accustomed to relying on other people's approval. Because I sometime value so much what awards other people assigned to my various career options, I am also at times unable to recognize what I actually want. Far too often, I let others tell me what I want.
Life after college is less clear. There are no more grades and no more clear life paths. For the first time in my life I find that I must fully take responsibility for deciding what I want and what I will pursue with my limited resources and time. I find this situation rather frightening, because in the absence of people to reward my behavior I must also take responsibility for determining the worth of my own decisions. And, yet, terrifying though this state of affairs is, it is also exciting. It has made me realize that agency is not something that I was born with or that I simply have, but its a skill that I am just learning to practice. Agency is not a gift, but rather a psychological achievement and something that we must allow ourselves to take. It is nothing short of claiming my life as mine to make - and that task I find as daunting as it is exciting.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Local motion: making local voices count in a global age
A few weeks ago our stake had stake conference. This conference took the form of a one-way broadcast from Salt Lake in which several General Authorities and a General Young Woman's Leader addressed us via satellite from Salt Lake. I genuinely appreciate this attempt by the leadership in Salt Lake to connect with LDS members in other regions, but I also felt that this conference illustrated the pressing need for our church to access local voices.
Stake conference plays an important role in developing local church communities. It presents one time in which local leadership can help members understand the particular challenges that their unique outpost of LDS faith faces. The introduction of these new broadcasts dismantles that opportunity, replacing it instead with a chance to listen to leaders who, in our case, repeated general conference addresses and are often painfully out of touch with local concerns.
This broadcast demonstrated that we now have the technology in place to effectively bring the voices of leaders to people who do not generally connect with them. However, it also demonstrated how inadequately we have developed a social system that enables leaders to hear local voices in exchange.
In part, we might attribute the fact that we have not successfully found a way to bring local concerns to the attention of Salt Lake to the very models of priesthood organization that we rely upon. Namely, we utilize a hierarchical chain of command - not unlike certain business structures - in which each local leader reports to his supervisor. Although this system functions well to ensure that information moves from the top down, it also presents numerous opportunities for information NOT to move from the bottom up, because information can stop with any one member of the chain.
This heirarchical method for communicating information becomes particularly problematic when we note that organizations tend to appoint leaders who thrive within the current system. In other words, organizations tend to appoint as new leaders those who most successfully model the leaders already in place, thus creating a governing body that lacks diversity. In the wards I have lived in, people who thrive within business or the law while attending church regularly tend to epitmize leadership and Mormon success.
While this practice might be useful in some situations, it also makes it likely that the voices of those whose concerns do not match the leaderships' will not be heard. Within the church, the fact that our chain of command works through the priesthood organization makes the problem of women's voices being lost especially acute.
For many years this hierarchical system has helped to give us the comforting reassurance that the church "is the same" wherever we go. But while we ought to maintain consistently throughout the world in our core beliefs, we also need to appreciate how the church culture can and should be different as local needs dictate. If we are to have a church that can continue to respond to its members' needs, and a church whose leaders can know what questions to bring to the Lord, then we need to develop more dynamic channels through which to communicate information. It seems quite telling that the most successful companies today have made improved communication their business.
Stake conference plays an important role in developing local church communities. It presents one time in which local leadership can help members understand the particular challenges that their unique outpost of LDS faith faces. The introduction of these new broadcasts dismantles that opportunity, replacing it instead with a chance to listen to leaders who, in our case, repeated general conference addresses and are often painfully out of touch with local concerns.
This broadcast demonstrated that we now have the technology in place to effectively bring the voices of leaders to people who do not generally connect with them. However, it also demonstrated how inadequately we have developed a social system that enables leaders to hear local voices in exchange.
In part, we might attribute the fact that we have not successfully found a way to bring local concerns to the attention of Salt Lake to the very models of priesthood organization that we rely upon. Namely, we utilize a hierarchical chain of command - not unlike certain business structures - in which each local leader reports to his supervisor. Although this system functions well to ensure that information moves from the top down, it also presents numerous opportunities for information NOT to move from the bottom up, because information can stop with any one member of the chain.
This heirarchical method for communicating information becomes particularly problematic when we note that organizations tend to appoint leaders who thrive within the current system. In other words, organizations tend to appoint as new leaders those who most successfully model the leaders already in place, thus creating a governing body that lacks diversity. In the wards I have lived in, people who thrive within business or the law while attending church regularly tend to epitmize leadership and Mormon success.
While this practice might be useful in some situations, it also makes it likely that the voices of those whose concerns do not match the leaderships' will not be heard. Within the church, the fact that our chain of command works through the priesthood organization makes the problem of women's voices being lost especially acute.
For many years this hierarchical system has helped to give us the comforting reassurance that the church "is the same" wherever we go. But while we ought to maintain consistently throughout the world in our core beliefs, we also need to appreciate how the church culture can and should be different as local needs dictate. If we are to have a church that can continue to respond to its members' needs, and a church whose leaders can know what questions to bring to the Lord, then we need to develop more dynamic channels through which to communicate information. It seems quite telling that the most successful companies today have made improved communication their business.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Spirituality in the city
After several weeks of being out of town, I am back again. In fact, my own friends visited me last week from North Carolina. At dinner, we began discussing the differences between how, unlike in Elders Quorum, assertive and controversial comments are widely discouraged by the culture of Relief Society.
Normally, I am inclined to attribute these facts to my feeling that the reigning prescriptive cultural norm of Mormon womanhood has little place for the assertive manners of speaking that women who are, for example, CEO's or other professionsals use to speak with authority in the work place. When these professional, educated women transfer the style of speaking that they use in their daily lives to Relief Society, I feel that they often meet resistance from a setting that values the "emotional" well-being of its members far more than their intellectual health.
However, my friends from North Carolina made me wonder if perhaps there are not other factors that contribute to the fact that in Relief Society we find people speaking in a confessional, nurturing manner rather than in patterns of speech guided more by inquiry. Namely, I was struck by the fact that my wonderful friends from North Carolina lived life at a much, much slower pace than it is possible to in the heart of New York City where I reside. As I was speaking effeciently and watching the clock so that I could make it to my work on time, they chatted with everyone, took in the world around them, and disclosed large aspects of their personal histories to those they met.
Perhaps these qualities were peculiar to my friends, but I began to think about how the models that we have for spiritual conversations and sacred places generally derive from people who lived in the countryside. One would look in vain for a Sacred Grove in the middle of Manhattan, not to mention neighbors that would welcome a long chat. And, I began to wonder whether people in the country and the city experience their spirituality in different terms as a consequence of the environment they live within. Surely, many of the ways that we are expected to speak in church settings reflect gender norms, but I would be interested in hearing from readers about whether they have found that where they live influences the type of conversations that they consider spiritual.
Normally, I am inclined to attribute these facts to my feeling that the reigning prescriptive cultural norm of Mormon womanhood has little place for the assertive manners of speaking that women who are, for example, CEO's or other professionsals use to speak with authority in the work place. When these professional, educated women transfer the style of speaking that they use in their daily lives to Relief Society, I feel that they often meet resistance from a setting that values the "emotional" well-being of its members far more than their intellectual health.
However, my friends from North Carolina made me wonder if perhaps there are not other factors that contribute to the fact that in Relief Society we find people speaking in a confessional, nurturing manner rather than in patterns of speech guided more by inquiry. Namely, I was struck by the fact that my wonderful friends from North Carolina lived life at a much, much slower pace than it is possible to in the heart of New York City where I reside. As I was speaking effeciently and watching the clock so that I could make it to my work on time, they chatted with everyone, took in the world around them, and disclosed large aspects of their personal histories to those they met.
Perhaps these qualities were peculiar to my friends, but I began to think about how the models that we have for spiritual conversations and sacred places generally derive from people who lived in the countryside. One would look in vain for a Sacred Grove in the middle of Manhattan, not to mention neighbors that would welcome a long chat. And, I began to wonder whether people in the country and the city experience their spirituality in different terms as a consequence of the environment they live within. Surely, many of the ways that we are expected to speak in church settings reflect gender norms, but I would be interested in hearing from readers about whether they have found that where they live influences the type of conversations that they consider spiritual.
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